Everything morning of the work-week, I’m awakened by my clock radio. Usually, the sounds coming from it are that of an especially annoying DJ. This morning was a bit different; there was a news anchor on the air giving live coverage of the shuttle Discovery making it’s way home. He said it would be landing in about 10 minutes; so I hit the snooze button. :)

When the clock went off again, I got up, headed for my TV and found some live video coverage of the event. I’d gotten up just in time as the shuttle landed safely a few seconds later. Welcome home Discovery crew and congratulations to you and to all of NASA on a successful trip!

Welcome home! © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

• Venus or Mars?
• Blind Boy Masters Video Games
• Physics taught via Super Mario Machinima
• IRA says armed campaign is over
• Free MMORPG Lair

Not from Pukka, but still worthy of notice:

• Millennium Falcon & other StarWarrs Parkflyers
• Shoot someone? Not Smith & Wesson’s fault. Copy a movie? Grokster’s fault.
  

  Got that? If a company makes a product that is inappropriately used to illegally copy a movie, that company is liable. If a company makes a product that is inappropriately used to illegally kill a human, that company is not liable.

  Kuddos to Les for pointing this one out.

• Spitzer Finds Life Components in Young Universe
• Ten thousand superballs rolling down a San Francisco hill-street

Pukka’s Links of the Week © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

For more info visit NASA’s Return to Flight website. For a great photo of the launch, go hit up APOD.

We have lift off! © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

• Google Moon: “In honor of the first manned Moon landing, which took place on July 20, 1969, we’ve added some NASA imagery to the Google Maps interface to help you pay your own visit to our celestial neighbor.” Zoom all the way in to find out one of the moon’s secrets.
• PhotoMuse: “An ambitious project to create one of the largest freely accessible databases of masterwork photography anywhere on the Web, a venture that will bring their collections to much greater public notice and provide an immense resource for photography aficionados, both scholars and amateurs.” Found via the New York Times
• Hacker Erased Spammer’s Database

¹ Come to think of it, I’m not sure he was even in the office this week.

Pukka’s Links of the Week © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

• Summer Moon Illusion
• Duck Hunt Emulator

¹ There’ll be a post up about that later.

Pukka’s Links of the Week © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

NASA Details Earthquake Effects on the Earth
January 10, 2005

NASA scientists using data from the Indonesian earthquake calculated it affected Earth’s rotation, decreased the length of day, slightly changed the planet’s shape, and shifted the North Pole by centimeters. The earthquake that created the huge tsunami also changed the Earth’s rotation.

Read the rest of this article here

As if the days weren’t already too short… © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

Mr. Armstrong, I salute you.

There and back again… © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

Duct Tape is Everywhere! © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.